May 01, 2007

Did CO's USA Hide His Abramoff-Related Lobbying?

In my post examining who BushCo has replaced the fired USAs with on the Native American Issues Subcommittee, I pointed out that DOJ decided to hide a salient fact about CO's USA Troy Eid's background. His DOJ bio reads:

Prior to joining Greenberg Traurig in 2003, Troy served for five years on the Cabinet of Colorado Governor Bill Owens.

Returning
to law practice in 2003, Troy was a partner in the Denver office of a
national law firm, focusing on environmental, energy, technology, and
federal Indian law, and was rated as one of America's best business
attorneys by CHAMBERS USA.

Mind you, the USA site used the older bio until the last couple of weeks. Only since USA Purge has become a scandal has DOJ made a concerted effort to hide the fact that Troy Eid worked in Native American law at Greenberg Traurig at the same time as Jack Abramoff worked there (Eid started at GT in November 2003, and Abramoff resigned under pressure in March 2004, after the scandal started breaking out).

But, as work from Rayne and MBW has revealed, that's not the only thing Troy Eid seems to be hiding. In fact, there seems to be no record that he sent a letter to Gayle Norton on behalf of one of GT's tribal clients. Effectively, Eid seems to have lobbied DOI without disclosing it.

Not long after Eid started at GT, he wrote a letter to fellow Coloradan, Gayle Norton, to push to accelerate tribal recognition for the Mashpee tribe. (Eid seems to have known Norton from joint service on the Columbine report, if not from their mutual work on Western land use issues.)

On Nov. 25, 2003, Troy A. Eid, a shareholder with the lobbying
firm of Greenberg Traurig LLP. wrote Norton.‘’Thanks for taking the
time to visit last week. I really enjoyed seeing you,’’ the letter
begins. ‘’The Mashpee would like to meet with Interior to discuss the
concept of developing a timetable for resolving the tribal recognition
issue one way or another.’’
Instead of agreeing to a meeting, Norton sent back a letter detailing
the status of the tribe’s petition.

Troy Eid only registered for the lobbying he did for Covergsys,
and he only listed the White House, Labor, and DHS ("and others"), and
the House and Senate, among those he lobbied. You'll note that Kevin
Ring, who just stepped down from his own law firm and who has ties to
the DOJ Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division
who had to resign because of potential ties to the Abramoff scandal,
was on the contract with Eid. So were Michael Smith and Stephanie Leger
Short, who were found to have accepted improper payments from Native American tribes (and Edward
Ayoob, who has ties to Harry Reid, is on there too). Bob Ney staffer Neil Volz even shows up. Right
there on the same lobbying disclosure form with the current USA from CO.

Meanwhile, GT's lobbying disclosure
for work they did for the Mashpee names many of those same people. But
it only records lobbying the House and Senate, not Department of
Interior. This, even though the lobbying disclosure admits they were
lobbying about tribal recognition, precisely the subject of Eid's
letter to Norton.

Now, Eid claims that he and Jack Abramoff had nothing to do with each other.

Eid and Abramoff both worked in divisions
that represented American Indian tribes. But Eid has said he joined
Greenberg Traurig in 2003, about the time Abramoff was being fired.

But to make that claim, he rewrites history, pushing back Abramoff's forced resignation by six months. Besides, this wouldn't be the first time a Republican claimed not to know Jack Abramoff, in spite of hundreds of interactions with him.

Presumably all this stuff was checked out when he was vetted to be USA. But the bulk of that vetting happened after March 2006, when (we now know) Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson were in charge of hiring and firing. But a letter (and, from the context, apparently a visit) sure seems like it counts as lobbying to me. So why didn't Troy Eid disclose the letter?

I get that they wanted to shut down the "Indian thing" at the DoJ to get Abramoff et al off the radar [see this]. But your posts [and others] imply they had more than just that in mind for the Native Americans. What do you think Rove/DoJ were up to? It's not that I don't believe, I just haven't caught that wave yet.

This shit's getting pretty damned deep. My only concern is that this mess starts getting "too complicated" for coverage by our smiling hair-in-perfect-place anchor people. Producers have a low regard for the intelligence of the viewing public. I think they're wrong, but there it is.

Now the DC Madam, that's "good" news---all media will be drooling over that all weekend, it's a simple story and the public can visualize naked women in fantasy role play with government officials at $300 an hour. Sweeps week, too, isn't that convenient?

Good thing you have a copy of that CV, EW. Comparing that document against the DOI profile is quite interesting.

And I haven't given up on the oddity of 'shareholder' versus 'partner'. Eid made a point of using that particular word for a specific reason on his own CV; that's not just fluff by a reporter. If Abramoff was an employee and/or partner in GT but not a shareholder, Eid may have had the greater fiduciary responsibility and dotted-line if not direct oversight. As a shareholder he may have been in a position to shape company strategy more so than the many partners. Which makes me wonder: would financials have to be disclosed as part of vetting? How long would it take to acquire GT shares -- and how long to spin them off?

And who in the FBI did the so-called deep background checks as part of the vetting? Somebody without access to teh Google??

There are several reasons why BushCO doesn't want NAs to have a fair shake at justice:

1) The US stands to pay $200 billion in the Cobell lawsuit, basically more than a year of Iraq war payments, for the cheating we've done in the past. They'd like to make sure no one at DOJ stands in the way of an unfair settlement.

2) The US has been cheating NAs out of royalties for things like natural gas for some time, so they'd like some people who are experts at winning resource rights from NAs rather than experts at making sure they get full value in place.

3) The GOP has made a concerted effort to infiltrate the NA community through their gambling programs, both as a way to place compliant leaders in place, to control where new power cetners arise, to get some of the money (and possibly to use the casinos to launder money). They need to hide their Abramoff tracks from the past, but also keep the gig going. So again, compliant folks at DOJ.

4) There are a number of other resource issues--basically the GOP finds it inconvenient that tribes own some key real estate in this country, particularly related to water and energy rights, and they'd like to continue to treat NAs the same way Republicans always treat people of color, rather than having to negotiate fairly.

It's the same thing we've been doing for 400 years, only this time, they're using newfangled financial schemes to do it.

marksb

That's okay. Let the DC madam take some people down, by the time that simmers down, this will be ready to boil again.

EW - It is really interesting, and I think good, to get the take of locals who have their eye on individual threads on the USA mess. Mbw is superb. Diane Silver is doing some good stuff, and has a newspaper/journalism background, on the Kansas and Missouri issues. She writes at Watching Those We Chose. Here is url for one of her pieces http://proctoringcongress.blogspot.com/2007/05/putting-us-attorney-scandal-into.html

It is I who owe you the thanks. It is the legal and Constitutional issues that get my interest and you constantly are involved in them and have an incredible aptitude for marshalling detailed facts that make my thought processes possible. By the way, I am trying to get Paul to go to lunch and have a chat.

WINDOW ROCK — A pipeline right-of-way agreement between the Navajo Nation and El Paso Natural Gas is set to expire at midnight with negotiators for both sides still hundreds of millions of dollars apart on the value of the 20-year lease.

Following an executive-session status briefing Thursday before the Resources Committee, Chairman George Arthur said El Paso has made an offer on a time extension; however, "We haven't talked with them in respect to any dollar value. In fact, we're not interested at this point in time to give them any extension."

El Paso attorneys Christopher Castillo of Colorado Springs and Troy Eid of Greenberg Traurig LLP in Denver attended Thursday's meeting in hopes of presenting their side but were booted out of the executive session for several hours along with the rest of the public. Chairman Arthur and Delegate Larry Noble voted against the executive session.

The whole Gallup Independent article is really great as background on the dispute, which has the potential to make lots of energy companies richer and lots of Indians poor, and tribes much less "sovereign" over their own land and resources.

So now it's clear to me why it was so important to get Eid in, even with his potential Abramoff taint. Time to take a closer look at other Western replacement USAs.

The replacements for Charlton and Iglesias are either FUSAs or CRM heads--so they're probably not fully loaded partisans like Eid. Note, though, that Domenici also didn't get his choice for USA (even though he tried Peter Fitzgerald's trick of doing a press conference to name his choices). So whoever BushCo would LIKE has to be pretty bad.

"Troy Eid specializes in land use and environmental law, governmental affairs, and public law, including practice before local, state, tribal and federal administrative and regulatory agencies.

Troy served as lead counsel in representing one of the world's largest corporations in a national enforcement action by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency alleging violations of the storm water provisions of the Clean Water Act at multiple construction sites across the country. Troy also has represented public and private employers in complex negotiations with various Indian Tribes and the federal government."

EW, thanks for clarifying something I have never fully understood -- that is, why Abramoff seemed to specialize in fleecing Native American tribes. I'm also wondering whether Abramoff's activities date back to Cheney's Energy Task Force. I have always thought that that Task Force was all about getting their hands on Iraq's oil. Now I'm wondering whether they had a domestic agenda as well, in terms of taking advantage of resources controlled by Native Americans. From your description it appears that Abramoff was the conduit of money to keep compliant legislators and Native authorities in place, while the WH would stack the deck at DoJ to keep them from pursuing any wrongdoing, while Cheney and his pals raked in the profits across the board, while Rove developed and maintained his Permanent Repbulican Majority to keep this well oiled machine running in perpetuity. I'm finally starting to see how the puzzle pieces connect -- thank you.

Oh, Abramoff was definitely involved in the Task Force--he was on the transition team for DOI, which had him in place to do this stuff from the start.

A different way to think of Cheney's Task Force is as a strategy session to 1) reinforce the current basis for global hegemony (access to cheap energy supplies) and 2) sustain that even though that basis is unsustainable (bc of peak oil). Part of the strategy had to do with wresting control of reserves out of state-owned companies, which the Iraq war might have accomplished on several levels (by weakening OPEC and providing a replacement for Saudi Arabia as the swing producer). And part of the strategy had to do with sucking out all the cheap supplies in the US, by legal or illegal means. Since so much of the supplies are in Native Amercan hands, and since it's so fun (if you're a corrupt Republican) to screw over brown people, Native Americans were a huge part of the strategy.